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Toronto International Film Festival 2005: Take One

Two thousand and five will go down in the festival’s history as the year when the movies got a little crappier and the celebrities got a little crabbier.

Toronto International Film Festival 2005: Take One
Photo: Lionsgate

Two thousand and five will go down in Toronto International Film Festival history as the year when the movies got a little crappier and the celebrities got a little crabbier. With Ed Harris flinging drinking glasses at the wall, Cameron Diaz snapping at photogs, and Keanu Reeves seeming like he’d rather be anywhere else, the mood at this year’s fest was often less than festive. But their lack of patience can be partially understood, what with the barrage of ridiculous questions being thrown at them daily, and the poorer quality of the movies this year. Debacles like Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (already being edited down after tremendously bad buzz) and Guy Ritchie’s Revolver (which nobody liked except for the types who only see one or two movies there while they prowl for celebs) left many scratching their heads. Is this the type of stuff necessary to a prestigious North American festival? It left many wondering if some of these people should be pulled out from under the red carpet.

But the great thing about this particular festival is that it is what you make of it. With over 300 movies screening, you can finagle pretty much anything into an itinerary, and contrary to the festival’s insistence that everything is sold out, there were empty seats at every single movie I attended. Even Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which was one of the most buzzed-about movies at the festival, especially after its Venice Golden Lion victory (which led director Lee to board a plane back to Venice after arriving in Toronto, only to return again for its second public screening). And the win was well-deserved. Easily the best non-documentary film I saw at the festival, Lee beautifully adapts Annie Proulx’s short story about two men (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who meet as ranch hands in Wyoming and carry on a decades-long love affair that remains a secret to the world at large, even after they have married and had children. Lee can switch genres with modulated ease and Brokeback Mountain is so tastefully appointed I can’t imagine anyone objecting to it. And the movie has undeniable staying power, with its haunting lament for the repressed and lovesick, embodied especially in Ledger’s revelatory portrayal of the more withdrawn of the duo. His performance is so lived-in and sorrowful, you’ll swear you’ve never seen this actor before in your life.

From the vistas of Wyoming to the mimed plantations of Alabama, Lars von Trier continues his American trilogy with Manderlay, the unfairly dismissed follow-up to his blazingly original Dogville. It does not have his previous film’s boldness or sense of event, but it is a very worthy extension of the ideas he presented in Dogville. Taking its heroine Grace, played this round by the game and intriguing Bryce Dallas Howard (still no match for Nicole Kidman), to a post-slavery house in the South, where she begins to impose her value system on the locals, it is too brimming with thought to easily brush aside. It’s impossible to say it isn’t made by one of the world’s most continually fascinating auteurs, someone you never have to worry about selling out.

Another cinema bad boy, Abel Ferrara, has less success tackling a big theme, religious faith in our apocalyptic times, in Mary, a thoroughly ambitious but seriously muddled passion play. There’s a wealth of dynamic story threads here, and that’s just the problem. For an 83-minute movie, it’s simply too scattered, and doesn’t properly utilize a lot of its good cast, save for Matthew Modine, who remarkably continues to land choice parts even though he is among the most obvious of living film actors.

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Political fervor also fueled some other entries, including the deliriously strange, pretty wretched, but unmissable Sorry, Haters, a first film from director Jeff Stanzler. A paranoid New York version of Michael Mann’s Collateral, Robin Wright Penn (terrific here) plays a batty fare who takes an unassuming Arab cabbie (director Abdellatif Kechiche) on the nightmare of his life. The movie keeps raising the stakes of credibility before culminating in the most hilarious denouement this side of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. Except it’s meant to be serious…I think. Even so, it’s a sunny picnic next to Thom Fitzgerald’s heavy-handed 3 Needles, an elegy for Africa’s HIV-ravaged masses, who are cared for by three well-meaning nuns (Chloë Sevigny, Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh). Into this already unnecessary narrative, the film splices in the story of a Canadian porn star (Shawn Ashmore) hiding his positive status from his co-stars and family (including mom Stockard Channing, who sounds Quebec-ese by way of Zsa Zsa Gabor). It never breaks out of tract, and goes on for an eternity. And Dukakis’s lilting narration sounds more attuned to Desperate Housewives than a dead-serious and often unremittingly ugly drama.

Juvenile delinquency also got a workout in Alberto Rodriguez’s taut 7 Virgins, a tale of a wayward teen on a 48-hour pass from juvie who spends his downtime reconnecting with old friends and creating havoc on the working-class town of Seville. It is a cautionary tale, but not terribly preachy, though so many buildings and items are vandalized in the picture, you’re amazed anything is left standing by the end of it. Imagine a sensation-less Larry Clark movie, and you’d pretty much have it. Speaking of Clark, he was here too, with his newest Wassup Rockers, a minor return to form after credibility-stretching exercises in excess. Chronicling the layabout days of a motley group of barrio Los Angelenos heavily into skateboarding and punk rock, it has shards of sensitivity and humor that feels authentic, not prefabricated. But not to worry, there is Clarkish glee in certain scenes (a drunken Beverly Hills socialite’s freakish, watery demise is a howler), but shockingly, no visible sex or rampant nudity.

But not to worry, you can see plenty of skin in The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron’s playful examination of the 1950s pin-up who sent crotches soaring even in a relatively puritanical time. There isn’t much of a reason for this movie’s existence, and Page is as opaque a woman after the film as before it, but Harron is a genuine filmmaker. The film is terrifically assembled, colorful, and often refreshingly to the point, and Gretchen Mol is an inspired choice for the lead. Page’s desire to break free from the fringes into something more mainstream seems ideal for Mol, who is as fetching as anyone could hope for, and seems truly liberated being nude, which is essential for this movie to work at all. And there’s more breasts and even male genitals in Clement Virgo’s Lie With Me, the Canadian filmmaker’s bid to redo Last Tango in Paris, even though it is closer to Emmanuelle in Rio. While confidently directed and containing fragments of interesting sexual exploration, the movie is never that frankly erotic; when you boil it down, it’s really Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs without the songs.

There were also the baffling messes, by filmmakers you would think should know better. Vincent Ward entranced audiences in 1993 with his rhapsodic romantic drama Map of the Human Heart, but will simply bore them with River Queen, a historical pageant centering on the Maori’s tumultuous relationship with white settlers in the 1800s. A beleaguered production (lead Samantha Morton apparently was instrumental in firing director Ward, which sent the New Zealand film world into a fit) and it shows, with so much cutting it would leave Edward Scissorhands’s blades dulled for life. There are flashes of Ward’s visual prowess, but the story is wretchedly hackneyed. And in taking on the musical, John Turturro flops with Romance & Cigarettes which must contain the year’s greatest cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Mary-Louise Parker, Elaine Stritch—and that’s just for starters!). But Turturro doesn’t know how to use any of them, except as dirty-mouthed embouchures of vulgarity, and the musical sequences have zero snap. Weirdly, though, the cast is still pretty good here, with Sarandon and Winslet giving it their all, and Stritch has a delicious cameo (the one she should have had in Monster-in-Law, which was so stupid an enterprise I wondered if those “filmmakers” even knew who she was).

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The worst entries, though (and probably the two worst ever in this festival), were actually made by previous collaborators. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe chronicled the disastrous filming and undoing of Terry Gilliam’s dream project Don Quixote in the engaging documentary Lost in La Mancha in 2003. Now all parties proceed to make moviegoing hell with their latest work. I found out after I saw Brothers of the Head that it was an adaptation of a cult novel by Brian Aldiss, and that made me despise it even more as it has no sense of the texture that Aldiss’s book must’ve had. Siamese twins become rock stars…and do drugs…and then die. Seriously folks, that’s the story. Pointless to the point of teeth-gritting, this smug mockumentary is like Hedwig and the Angry Inch crossed with This Is Spinal Tap if the music was shitty in both, the actors all stunk, and neither had any rhyme or reason for existence. What Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe sought out to achieve here is unfathomable; it’s one of those movies where it feels like the same three scenes play out for 90 minutes. And Terry Gilliam truly wants us all to feel his wrath with the audience-less Tideland, a grisly fairy tale gone rancid. Now, here is a movie that makes everyone wish they were a shifty film producer, just so they could tell Gilliam personally that they would never invest a red cent in it. Grotesque to the breaking point and beyond and back again, and dreadful in ways movies may not have invented yet, the movie is really just a patented “fuck you” to people who won’t let Gilliam make his mammothly expensive cinematic tomes. In the future, please leave us out of your whining, Mr. Gilliam.

The kids are all right, or are they? There were plenty of movies about teenagers, or in the case of Michael Cuesta’s Twelve and Holding, damn close enough. I was a big fan of L.I.E. years back. His new one is less satisfying but still solid. Espousing the idea that kids are more like adults than ever, the movie shows a community patching things up after a 12-year-old boy perishes in a treehouse fire, and its effect on three very different children, one of whom is the boy’s twin brother. Contrived and too silly at times, the direction remains steady, and the young cast isn’t bad, and Jeremy Renner is wonderful in a supporting part as an object of affection for one of them, a bespectacled borderline priss played charmingly by Zoe Weizenbaum. Mike Mills’s Thumbsucker is a rather empty mélange of Donnie Darko and its ilk, but persuasively acted by Tilda Swinton and magnificent newcomer Lou Pucci, who has the same boyish gleam and guile that marked the young Leonardo DiCaprio. The best of them, though, is Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, which gives Jeff Daniels the greatest role of his career as a harried father immersed in a messy divorce from his wife (Laura Linney) and the two young boys (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) caught in the middle of it. Baumbach really knows the power of a word but also a gesture, and the movie contains lots of off-color dialogue that, while being clever, also has the rub of observation as well.

Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story might be a bit too clever, not to mention jarringly brief, but this behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the unfilmable novel is cheeky enough to be more than agreeable. Winterbottom is one of the world’s most versatile filmmakers, and comedy becomes him, but it’s the dynamic cast that puts it over, including director’s muse Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Shirley Henderson and the game Gillian Anderson, sharply sending herself up.

On the Oscar front, you can pretty much add Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon to this year’s can’t-miss nominees for playing Johnny Cash and June Carter in Walk the Line, this year’s bid to duplicate Ray’s successes of 2004. And the blueprints aren’t that different, trouncing out a lot of the standard musical biopic devices we’ve all grown tired of. But James Mangold’s film is a little more relaxed than Taylor Hackford’s thuddingly transparent effort, and less egregious, and gives the two leads solid work. Phoenix is admirable as Cash, though the movie (like Ray) never gives you much of a sense of why he’s utterly revered, but this is Witherspoon’s show all the way. Finally returning to her roots as a real film actress, she steals the picture with her buoyant, measured portrayal of June, who thankfully isn’t the long-suffering wife (that role is taken, rather obnoxiously, by actress Ginnifer Goodwin), but a worthy adversary for Cash. And her singing voice is truly lovely as well, whereas Phoenix’s is merely serviceable. A lot of people are going to fall in love with her again, except this time it will be more than warranted.

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Lastly, there are the documentaries, which seem to be gaining in momentum at the festival with every year as they become more and more widely seen. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun is a kind of anti-doc documentary, a bold experiment that eschews the talking-heads style for a more ethereal one. Narrated by its central subject, a painter-filmmaker whose life is drastically changed when a mugging leaves him sightless for life, Tarn uses real-life imagery ranging from the obscure to the specific, and never once do you see the subject, which adds to its mysterious allure. It’s a gamble of a project, but it completely works. And the belle of the festival was Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street, a thorough, inspiring look at the unveiling of family secrets. Block, a New York-based filmmaker, manages to make poignant statements about aging, marriage, nostalgia and therapy while concentrating on the central tale of his father’s remarriage to a former secretary a mere three months after his wife’s sudden death. The movie constantly keeps springing surprises as he and his siblings uncover information about the parents’ marriage, but the movie is never coy or falsely self-important. Without overreaching or containing the disingenuous ardor of some recent documentaries, it has simplicity in spades, which makes the journey that much more rewarding. Even packing up and high-tailing it out of Canada, it lingered in my memory, and left the hope that maybe some of next year’s films would do the same.

The Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 8—17.

Jason Clark

Jason Clark is an entertainment junkie working as an awards reporter. He is the king of working musical revivals and well-versed in night terrors. He also likes anchovies.

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